Water After All

   December 14, 2019 – March 13, 2020
   Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL

Installation view, Water After All, MCA Chicago, 2019–20. Photo by Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

Artists Included:
Guillermo Galindo, John Gerrard

On loan to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibition Water After All are two artworks by Guillermo Galindo and four artworks by John Gerrard. 

On Galindo’s work, MCA Chicago writes: “Sound artist and composer Guillermo Galindo builds instruments from found objects such as animal bone, children’s toys, and flashlights, which he gathers from United States-Mexico borderlands. He then uses these instruments to compose original scores of music. In these works, Galindo screen printed his musical compositions directly onto found flags. The flags were originally made by Water Stations, a humanitarian organization that used them to mark water tanks placed along the United States-Mexico border for crossing migrants.
For more information on Water Stations, visit waterstations.org.”

On Gerrard’s work, MCA Chicago writes: “These four screens show renderings of oil slicks on the Danube, Amazon, Yangtze, and Nile Rivers hypnotically rippling with the shifting waters. As is typical with John Gerrards work, the scenes are nondurational–instead, they are rendered live, and each simulation corresponds to the real time of day in the location depicted. Gerrard’s selection of rivers from the different corners of the planet implies that the prioritization of industry over the environment is a global issue.”

Water After All reveals a glimpse of the many connections between humans and water. This exhibition is centered around our recent acquisition of Ghana-born British filmmaker John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea. Presented in a spellbinding, three-screen installation, Akomfrah uses archival images, nature cinematography, and staged recreations; crossing time and space to reveal the poetic awe and horror of humanity’s relationship with water. The artworks surrounding Vertigo Seaexpand the exhibition’s thematic focus, diving deeper into our reliance on, exploitation of, and contact with our precious environment, including works by Catherine Opie, Guillermo Galindo, John Gerrard, Alfredo Jaar, William Kentridge, and others.

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